Category: community and culture

The new movie The Invite, which is widely recommended, is a summer diversion, and not much more.

Angela (Olivia Wilde) secretly invites their upstairs neighbors Pína (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton), whose late-night sex has bothered both her husband Joe (Seth Rogen) and her. Their neighbors, who apologize for the noise and elaborate on its origins, ultimately help Angela and Joe realize that they need to reset their marriage or end it.

This movie, which is a remake of a 2020 Spanish version by Cesc Gay based upon his 2015 play, has also been adapted into French, Italian, Swiss, Russian, Czech and South Korean. This version, which was written by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones and directed by Wilde, allowed Wilde to fulfill a dream about the proper way to make a movie, and also why she dedicated it to her late mentor.

The best part I believe is the ensemble. Rogen and Norton lack the range of, and as a result are less convincing than, Cruz and Wilde, and could have been pushed for more. Nonetheless, the four manage and maintain the tension, and prevent it from escaping until the end, which is a credit to both the cast and the director and challenges a general concern about directors who direct themselves.

The most challenging part for me was a the story, which at least in this version suffers from a narrative identity crisis and never finds its way. It starts strong, and adds potentially productive complications — how should neighbors confront each other, and how do new relationships complement or complicate longer, and more established, ones? — but never settles into a compelling conversation, which is ultimately confusing.

This this movie a discussion of communal living or conventional marriage or love and loss? A coming-of-age-in-later-life story? A story about inevitable disappointments, including the limits of love, or even the a regular disconnect between dreams and daily life?

The answer is likely a mix of these but as such remains messy, and thus superficial. Part of this challenge could be the effects of adaptation, translation, or both, but the resulting story seems to suffer as much from being workshopped (or focus-grouped) too much.

I wonder about the discussion between Joe and Angela the next morning or among any of them in the elevator or lobby the next time. Such omissions I realize can be intentional, but these choices succeed when the purpose is convincing and clear.

As a result, I’d recommend this moving as a summertime diversion, a more sophisticated one than any action blockbuster and yet little more satisfying.

The new movie Girls Like Girls, which is widely recommended, seems as confused as its characters are supposed to be.

Teenage Coley (Maya da Costa), who has relocated from San Diego after her mother’s death to her estranged father’s rural Oregon home, is befriended by Sonya (Myra Molloy). Their friendship soon becomes romantic and then is abruptly ended when Sonya leaves for summer dance camp, and both confront their feelings and fears, and renew their relationship, after Sonya returns.

Director Haley Kiyoko, who co-authored the screenplay with Stefanie Scott and Chloe Okuno, explains in introductory remarks that this movie originated as a song (2015) and later became a novel (2023). She also adds for those who are unfamiliar with these previous versions that it’s an account of being seen, and addresses the need for more queer stories.

Girls as a movie is successful enough. The cinematography is evocatively languid, and elicits high school summer experience. Also, Da Costa is credible even as she stops short of exploring some emotions, which seems as much a directing and writing problem.

One problem however is its relevance. Lesbian love has a long history at least in the West (e.g., Sappho’s 630-570 BCE love poems). Moreover, more than 6 in 10 Americans today still believe that gay or lesbian relationships are morally acceptable, and most LGBTQ Americans today report feeling socially supported.

A bigger problem is that the story seems as confused as some of its characters. The movie is considered a romantic coming-of-age story, but its plot suggests something more complicated that to its detriment is never examined.

One obvious possibility is the challenge to heterosexual expectations that Coley’s and Sonya’s relationship poses as expressed by Sonya’s sometime boyfriend Trenton (Levon Hawke). Another perhaps less so arises in the awkward exchanges between Coley and her estranged father Curtis (Zach Braff), which seem less about Coley’s sexual identity than their family history, and which reappear in the mostly off-camera interactions between Sonya and her mother and sister.

These and other possibilities offer opportunities to offer something more than saccharinely superficial sentiments about lesbian love, and explain why this story from someone whose fans consider “lesbian Jesus” seems more like an after-school special. This condition seems confirmed by my discovery after the move that the adapted song was offered as a YA novel.

This movie also represents the icult of the individual, but this constraint is part of a larger cultural immediacy complaint, and not specific to this movie. That however is only one more reason why this movie is more suitable for smaller screens, such as a music video, and not a big one as a feature film.